The right to an attorney is fundamental to the U.S. justice system. However, in a small Mississippi court off the interstate between Jackson and Memphis, that right is tenuous. The two judges in Yalobusha County Justice Court appointed lawyers for just 20% of the five dozen felony defendants who came before them in 2022, according to a review of court records; nationally, experts estimate that lawyers are appointed to at least 80% of felony defendants at some point in the legal process because they’re deemed poor. In this court, the way these two judges decide who gets a court-appointed attorney appears to violate state rules meant to protect defendants’ rights. A few defendants have even been forced to represent themselves in key hearings. Despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee that everyone gets a lawyer even if they’re too poor to pay for one, most felony defendants in this court went without any representation at all before their cases were forwarded to a grand jury, according to a review of one full year of court files by the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, The Marshall Project, and ProPublica. Read more about how we analyzed the court’s appointment rate in our methodology. “That is a huge problem,” said André de Gruy, who leads a state office that handles death penalty cases and felony appeals but has no power over local public defense. “I believe almost every one of those people would like a lawyer and is unable to afford one.” For decades, civil rights advocates and legal reformers have complained that Mississippi is among the worst states in the country in providing attorneys for poor criminal defendants. It’s one of a handful of states where public defense is managed and funded almost entirely by local governments, and the way they do so varies greatly from county to county. Defendants in some places see appointed lawyers quickly and remain represented thereafter; elsewhere, sometimes right over the county line, defendants can wait months just to see a lawyer or can go long periods without having one at all. The Mississippi Supreme Court, which oversees how state courts operate, has issued several rules in recent years that were intended to drive improvements. However, it is up to locally elected judges to carry out those mandates, and there’s no oversight to make sure they’re doing it right. Much like Mississippi, Texas places primary responsibility for public defense on counties. A state commission in Texas investigates the counties with low appointment rates; a felony appointment rate below 50% would raise serious questions about a county’s compliance with state law, according to current and former officials there. In Mississippi, state officials don’t even know how often judges appoint attorneys. When people are arrested on felonies in Yalobusha County, a rural area in north Mississippi with just 12,400 residents, many have initial hearings in the county’s Justice Court. Judges there primarily handle misdemeanors. But when a felony defendant appears in their court, it falls to Judge Trent Howell and Judge Janet Caulder to deliver on the Sixth Amendment’s promise. Caulder handles many initial hearings, where she’s required by state rules to find out whether a defendant is too poor to afford an attorney and to appoint one if so. Although Caulder informs defendants of their right to an attorney, she said she doesn’t ask if they can afford one and appoints one only if they request it. “I don’t question them. I don’t try to force indigency on them,” she said. (Neither she nor Howell would comment on their appointment rate.) Caulder and Howell are supposed to operate by the same rules as judges in circuit court, who handle felony cases from indictment through trial. But that doesn’t appear to be what’s happening: 15 of the cases that Howell and Caulder handled in 2022 are now in circuit court; just four of those defendants were appointed attorneys in Justice Court, but 13 were provided with lawyers when their cases moved to circuit court. Explaining why he is sometimes reluctant to appoint an attorney, Howell told the news outlets that he has a “fiduciary duty” to spend taxpayers’ money wisely. He said he’s more likely to provide a lawyer if a defendant is in jail because a lawyer can seek a lower bond to get their client released. On the other hand, Howell said, “If they’re arrested on a felony and they’ve made bond, I’m not too quick to pull the trigger on a public defender — particularly if they’ve made a high bond.” State rules don’t allow Howell to consider whether someone made bond when he decides if he will appoint an attorney, but he said that doing so was just “human nature.” That’s what happened when Kayla Williams, a single mother with no stable job, came before Howell last summer on a charge of shooting and wounding her stepfather in a tussle. Williams, whose mental health issues include bipolar disorder, has been arrested three times in the past year or so after confrontations with others. In two hearings related to the shooting charge, Howell refused to appoint an attorney even though she said she couldn’t afford one, according to Williams, as well as a lawyer who observed one hearing and a reporter who observed another. In an interview, Howell defended his decision, which he made without asking a single question about Williams’ finances: “She just didn’t strike me as an indigent person.” “Can You Appoint Me a Lawyer? Because I Can’t Afford One.” Though Mississippi doesn’t have any guidelines for how judges should decide who is poor enough to get a court-appointed lawyer, a half-dozen legal experts who reviewed the facts of Williams’ case said she appears to qualify and that her constitutional rights have been violated. Problems getting a court-appointed lawyer began soon after she was arrested. On June 12, Williams’ elderly stepfather, whose name is Lawyer Crowder, was pulled over by a Yalobusha County sheriff’s deputy because he was weaving slowly down a rural road. Crowder, whose leg was bleeding, told the deputy that his stepdaughter had shot him. He had the pistol she used with him. Around the same time, Williams called 911 and said she had shot Crowder after he hit her, according to a dispatch log. Deputies arrested her and charged her with aggravated assault against a family member, a felony with a possible prison sentence of 20 years. (While Crowder told the news outlets that Williams started the fight and that he believes she meant to shoot him, he said: “I don’t want her put away. I want her to get some help.”) At Williams’ first court hearing a couple of days later, Caulder told her she had a right to a court-appointed lawyer, but the judge didn’t ask Williams if she could hire one herself. The state’s rules required Caulder to make a decision that day: “The determination of the right to appointed counsel, and the appointment of such counsel, is to be made no later than at the indigent defendant’s first appearance before a judge.” Caulder did gather the facts of Williams’ finances to set conditions for her release from jail — the same sort of information that judges use when deciding whether to appoint a lawyer. According to court records, the judge knew the 22-year-old mother had no job at the time and no place of her own to live. That should have been enough to prompt Caulder to appoint a lawyer, said de Gruy, the head of the state public defense office. Caulder, however, said she believes she complied with court rules because she told Williams of her rights. She always does that, she said, and she’s always willing to consider a request for a lawyer. Caulder shouldn’t force defendants to ask for a lawyer, said William Waller, a retired chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court who helped write the state’s court rules. That “is absolutely not right,” he said, because many defendants don’t know how or when to ask. “The judge makes the inquiry” to learn whether a defendant can afford an attorney, he said. Williams’ friends and family paid a bail bond company to post a $7,500 bond to get her out of jail. Her next opportunity to get a lawyer came a month later, when she walked into Howell’s courtroom in Water Valley for a hearing. Cliff Johnson, a
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